alt Hacker NewsBut yak shaving is fun
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Tangential but it's a story that I find funny.
At a previous job, my coworkers coined the term "Thomasing" [1], referring to me, as "the act of having a question explained so thoroughly, detailed, and long-winded that the asker has lost interest in the question that they were asking".
I thought it was pretty funny, because that does basically describe me in a nutshell.
[1] Lovingly, it was a good, fairly-tight-knit group, they weren't being jerks. We all did lighthearted ribbing.
My favourite Yak from Malcolm in the middle.
This feels like what is really splitting the programming community right now- those that have typically enjoyed the journey, and those that just want to be at the destination as soon as possible.
I can do a LOT more yak shaving on personal projects now. I still haven't managed to finish anything though.
Good article, I even remember the Yak Shaving Day episode of Ren and Stimpy but never made the connection with the slang term
The fact that programmers can be nerd sniped into yak shaving some random libraries is the only thing that keeps Open Source running.
So is breeding harrier and harrier yaks!
... but it's a highland cow
If you shave a yak, you get yak hair. And this material is like $35 a skein!
https://www.ulaandlia.com/collections/mongolian-baby-yak-woo...
Oh wait, you meant figuratively!
Yak-shaving-shaming puts limits on the creativity of talented engineers by constraining them to existing patterns and practices or building on top of abstractions, and practically, that results in engineers and teams with less breadth. In an applied software world that's exploded in framework and library complexity in recent years, I think there are always going to be yaks in dire need of a shave.